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The road to being thrown out of school is paved by missed opportunities for early intervention, a limited curriculum and poor teacher training.

That's the consensus of educators, parents and students concerned about a school system that suspended 112,829 pupils in Ontario in 2006-2007, the most recent data available. Another 1,889 students were expelled.

The number of suspensions issued was almost twice as high – 201,224. Many students are suspended multiple times, which suggests problems are snowballing.

What's clear is that teachers and principals spot signs of trouble as early as Grade 1. It's common, teachers say, for elementary students to divert attention from literacy or numeracy problems by acting out – from being the class clown to confronting teachers.

Kevin Battaglia, principal of the Toronto District School Board's programs for suspended and expelled students, recalls witnessing one Grade 6 child, who was struggling academically, become a deft shoplifter.

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"We all have a need to be good at something," he says.

The education ministry's figures show 42 per cent of all suspensions in 2006-2007 – 42,292 students – were from the elementary grades. Of expelled students, 14 per cent – 263 – were in elementary school.

Melanie Parrack, the TDSB's executive superintendent of programs, says the board is making "a concerted effort to focus interventions earlier." But more money is needed, she says, for social workers, youth workers, psychologists and teaching assistants.

While some argue principals are too quick to suspend, teachers think otherwise.

"There is a feeling among many of my members that they don't suspend quickly enough," said Doug Jolliffe, president of the Toronto branch of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation.

But fewer teachers are complaining since the new law on suspensions and expulsions took effect in February 2008, he adds. Anyone suspended more than five days must be offered an alternative academic program. Help with behavioural issues – anger management, for example – is offered for suspensions longer than 10 days.

Jolliffe says there's a sense the alternative programs are helping.

"The greatest challenge that teachers have is classroom management," he says. "What people forget is that a teacher's got anywhere from 25 to 35 people in a classroom, most of whom really don't want to be there for various reasons. You also have some students that have issues – they're angry about something that probably has nothing to do with schools."

Bay St. lawyer Glenn Stuart, who works with a program helping at-risk youth, says students struggle with a school system that values conformity and control. Many get suspended simply for opposing authority. "That's sort of like saying, `OK, we're suspending you because you're 15.'"

Jolliffe says principals aren't helping. They often don't flag troubled students to teachers. And the TDSB has been slow to deliver much-needed "crisis management" training, he adds.

Add to that pressure to deliver the curriculum through standardized tests as well as the need for more support staff and the result is "one of the toughest and most stressful jobs you got going," Jolliffe says.

"A lot of people – and these are good teachers, these aren't time-servers – are feeling a greater sense of depression, a greater sense of frustration. In some cases that emerges almost as an anger – not at students – but just a generalized anger," he says.

"Teachers don't feel they're part of the great experiment that is public education. They feel isolated."

Critics say the new law's provision of extra resources to expelled and some suspended students reflects the school system's Catch-22: to get help, many students need to be thrown out.

Many students get multiple suspensions every year, for less than five days at a time, and get nothing more than homework. Yet the accumulated impact can be disastrous: Studies show that students absent more than 10 per cent of the time are far more likely to drop out.

Once in high school, at-risk students are poorly served by a school system that caters to those bound for university, says Queen's University professor, Alan King, a leading researcher in education.

At the Toronto District School Board, the 60 per cent of students who don't go to university are left struggling to find "meaning" in their education – increasing the chances of some being suspended or expelled, he says.

"A lot of kids are caught with very little programming," says King, who has conducted major studies of the high school system for the Ontario government. "What you have is a fairly large group of kids ... not particularly well served by the system."

Especially worrisome in Toronto are cuts to technical programs. As the system becomes more oriented toward academic studies, students who perform better with hands-on learning "will be marginalized and placed more at risk," says Chris Wiggins, guidance counsellor for three TDSB programs for expelled and suspended students.

Declining enrolment prompted the board to recently close one of its last trade schools, Timothy Eaton Business and Technical Institute in Scarborough. The board is working hard to change the negative perception students and parents have of trades, says Parrack.

Compounding the challenge are teachers who largely don't reflect the diverse cultural makeup of students – particularly in Toronto, says Lance McCready, who heads a project on discipline and classroom management in schools.

"They're certainly not good at communicating with teenagers," adds McCready, assistant professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

The youngest, least-experienced teachers are given the most challenging classes, says professor Ray Hughes, who teaches student teachers at the University of Western Ontario. Their reactions to problem behaviours tend to escalate incidents, he adds.

Education Minister Kathleen Wynne says she's determined to transform the school system from a "sorting mechanism" that writes off kids who fail to one that caters to every student that enters a school.

Among other initiatives, she points to a new "equity strategy," designed to ensure that students don't fall behind due to ethnic or economic background, and the goal of turning schools into "community hubs" that help parents access an array of services.

CASE STUDY: A FUNERAL

On most nights, the six young people gathered around a table in a boardroom at the Black Creek Community Health Centre are here to hang out, maybe eat from the communal kitchen, which tonight smells of a stir-fry that will not quite fill the assembled stomachs and results in a pizza order.

On this spring evening, they are in this mall-front community hub to talk about being suspended. For some, multiple times, beginning in middle school.

There was often a good reason, like a fight. But there were questionable reasons, too. Like being rude, swearing or missing part of a uniform.

"I got suspended, quite a few times, " says Lola Lawson, 18, who is now at York University studying psychology.

Once it was after her math teacher told Lawson, who was struggling with an assignment, that she should know how to do the work. She responded: "You're a teacher and you're supposed to be teaching."

Lawson was sent to the office, and home.

"It's the teacher's word over yours, that the student is being defiant, or something. There you go, you get in trouble and suspended for something stupid like that."

Shantay, 15, says she was once suspended for missing class to attend a funeral.

Andrew, 19, began getting suspended in Grade 5 - "One of my friends started getting suspended in kindergarten" - but served the punishments in school.

"I actually liked it. I got to know my principal very well, so that was good, " he said.

The frequent suspensions didn't turn all the kids off school.

Lawson wants to be a teacher.

– Jim Rankin & Sandro Contenta

CASE STUDY: A BELLY BUMP

Can a tuque be cause for a suspension and a court date? It can if it also includes an alleged "belly bump."

On a wintry day in January 2008, James and several other students had finished their final exam and were outside a class in jackets preparing to go home. One or two of the teens had had tuques seized previously by a teacher, headgear being a no-no inside school.

They wanted them back. The kids said they were jovial that day and that they were joking with the teacher and the teacher was joking back.

In court, the teacher had a markedly different recollection: He was not joking. He said the tuque could be picked up several hours later.

He testified that James (not his real name) bumped him chest-to-chest, once "really hard" just as another boy behind applied a similar move, making for a teacher belly-bump sandwich.

The principal, after seeing a grainy video of the incident that showed no faces, called police.

James, now 16, was charged with assault. He was suspended and handed a limited expulsion. He could not return to his Durham Region Catholic high school. He missed 10 days of the start of the next semester before being put in a new school. His parents hired a lawyer and appealed. Months later, it was agreed the expulsion would disappear from his school record if his behaviour remained good.

The criminal case went ahead.

"This matter here today, " James's lawyer, Selwyn Pieters, said in his closing argument in the assault trial, "is trifling, very, very trifling. This is not a criminal matter." And there was certainly not enough evidence there to convict, he said.

Justice Paul Bellefontaine agreed, acquitting James.

Jim Rankin & Sandro Contenta

CASE STUDY: A TOKE

"Are you sure you don't have weed?"

Rayshawn had never seen the guy before, part of a group of young men who approached him and some friends in the yard of his Scarborough high school last September.

No, Rayshawn replied, he did not.

The guy did not believe Rayshawn and, in anger and allegedly aiming to rob him, pulled out a handgun. Rayshawn (not his real name) wrestled with the gunman and several shots were fired, striking one bystander. The school was locked down and the incident made front-page headlines.

Amid fears for his safety, Rayshawn was sent home to recover. He would never return to that school, nor would he go to any school - for five months.

Within days of the gun incident, stories made it to the principal's office that Rayshawn was dealing drugs at school - cause for a mandatory suspension and possible expulsion. Rayshawn admitted smoking weed on school property.

Rayshawn was suspended for 19 days. But for a number of reasons, including concerns for his safety and offers to go to other schools that did not work out, those days stretched into months.

Late in the year, the board offered him a spot in a pre-employment program. For a month, he learned about saving money and other life skills, and was paid $250 a week.

That was a good thing that happened, says Rayshawn's mom. Otherwise, he lost his semester.

"I feel as if they don't even care, " she says. "They just stick the child out of class, provide no work. I mean, what happens to the child's mental frame of mind? He's sitting here wondering, 'Why am I at home? I'm not getting no work.' When he does return to school now, you feel kind of lost because you have that big gap in between."

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